Ken Kesey: Final
Passage by Larry Leonard (Photos
from
keseypics
at
Intreped
Trips)

Westwind

The weather rolls from West to
EastLands passed are further blessedKaleidoscopy Klouds sail byAll wondering whyThe days turn as they doFrom old to newBut me and youWe see it throughAnd have a thing to say,or two.

LL, at the cabin on the east fork, 11/10/01

The time
I interviewed
him, we were alone. He did not like to do that with the
press.
A famous man is not safe in the company of just one journalist. They called
him
the western man, but they were wrong. Except for his courage and
a streak of cussed independence, he was as far from Gary Cooper as a
man
can be. He was, among other things, a politician. He
was tribal in nature, skilled at sensing the needs of the clan.
This
orientation toward people rather than place is reflected in his work,
which,
compared to that of some of his favorite authors, pays little attention
to the man shaped by the land. It is not that he lacked
descriptive
power, but rather that his major novels did not depend on their
location.
The Stampers could have been in Canada, Alaska or Idaho. His
asylum
could have been in any American city.

The people in biographical,
historical and
satirical books are real people. The people in a novel, even when
based on actual human beings, are symbolic people. All
novels
are symbolic in nature, and, at their deepest level, about the
author.

II

Harry Lenhart, now working the business
beat for
the Portland Tribune, was in those days the editor of Oregon
Magazine.
He sent me to Springfield to get the essence of the great author in a
piece
titled Ken Kesey at Midpassage. When he read what I wrote
about the great author, he said it was not definitive.
He was wrong. I told him so at the time,
and again as recently as last summer. My point in the piece was that a
giant question mark was hanging over Kesey. Nearly twenty years
later,
Kesey died, and the giant question mark went away. This is not
meant
to suggest that Kesey was lazy or afraid during those decades.
The
fact is that great novels find you, not the other way around. The
next great novel didn't find Kesey. The question has been
answered.,

Before I interviewed him, I attended
a meeting
where he was present. I recall describing it as like being on the
far side of a black hole. Everything in the universe was shooting
out in my direction. Then I went to meet with him. Here's
some
of the text from the 1982 article.

III

Late February. It has rained more this winter than just
about
any time in Oregon history. Today, even when it isn't raining, it
feels as if it is. Something like the great humidity of the
tropics,
but ice cold and clammy. The country around Kesey's farm is flat
as a miter board. There are no high spots of land -- just low and
a little lower
On the slope that descends from his house to the
swamp stands what Kesey calls a Chuckasaurus, a homemade dinosaur
constructed
by Kesey's brother, Charles. A perfectly round, Zen boulder sits
in the trail from the parking area to the remodeled barn the Keseys
call
home. The rock seems content in the faint rain shadows of the
evergreens.
There is a Kwakiutl ceremonial mask made from a car fender hanging on a
fence. On the back of a pickup a sticker says, "God Bless John
Wayne."

A giant, brightly colored macaw sits on a
perch over
a slab of what looks like Myrtlewood. The bird is almost always
on
that perch on that table, night and day, rain, snow, sleet and
hail.
It has lived there through five Oregon winters. There is no
tether.
It can come and go as it pleases. But it sits there under the
naked
branches of a deciduous tree in the icy rain, a stream of water
dripping
from its huge beak, staring at the visitor
"Hi," it says.
Fay Kesey answers the door. Her hair
is wrapped in a turban towel. She is wearing a long
housecoat.
'Ken's in his studio," she says, closing the door. She will be
seen
only at a distance after that. The Kesey children will not be
seen
at all.

Kesey's studio is a shed made of half-round,
debarked poles.
Half of it is dark and empty, an unused storage area. The working
end has a space heater, some ratty cabinets and old chairs, a few
cardboard
boxes, several lamps and a desk. On the desk are some reference
works,
Herman Melville's Moby Dick, the later sea stories of Ernest
Hemingway,
a portable radio, an odd, beat-up leather briefcase and Kesey's
crumpled
red handkerchief. It has been a long, wet, miserable winter.
Narrow, vertical windows flank the desk, casting
bars of light over the writer as he leans back in a protesting old
chair.
He is wearing a long-brimmed, leather visor, the kind so popular with
the
counter-culture set a decade or two ago.
He has somewhat reluctantly agreed to do the
interview.

"I've got piles and piles of stuff I've
worked on
in the demon box," Kesey is saying, staring at a battered
cardboard
box sitting in a dark cubbyhole in a beat-up cabinet.
He is more than aware of the Big Question
the Outside World has about him -- this talent who could easily be an
heir
apparent to Mailer and Bellow, and maybe even Faulkner and Hemingway,
for
the mantle of the Great American Writer. If only he would write
more.
The question is, Why does it take eighteen years to write another
novel?

His closest friend, Ken Babbs, says the question doesn't make
sense.
Kesey has that demon box full of stuff. It contains both
published
and unpublished, finished and unfinished pieces. Ideas that
stretch
from Sometimes a Great Notion (1964) to today. It
contains
wonderful allegories like the Rolling Stone article he did on the death
of John Lennon, the Esquire piece about Abdul and Ebenezer, a bull and
cow he owns; the themes covered in his strange revolutionary
periodical,
Spit
in the Ocean, miles of rambling, sarcastic, inventive,
evasive,
perceptive commentary to a googolplex of questions during an infinite
number
of interviews, all of which he hated because he "doesn't do well in
one-on-one
interviews..." and God knows what else that he has written or
said.
Babbs insists it is a body of work. Demon Box, aside from being
an
actual physical repository, also is apparently the working title for a
rambling novel Kesey has been working on for some time.

There was one recent book, Garage Sale, a
large,
scrapbook-like work in content and size, an existential, cartoony
collage
of stuff from the demon box that Kesey must have thought said something
important. In the introduction, written in 1973 by
Pulitzer
Prize winning playwright Arthur Miller, the book is described as
chaotic,
a vehicle, cynics would say, for credibility-by-association for Kesey's
friends, or perhaps something tossed off to generate income But
Miller
sees it, for all its weaknesses as a kind of modern American
revolutionary
history..

IV

From there, the article went into the
interview phase,
which I am not transcribing here. Perhaps one day, I shall, but
not
now. On that day his brain was floating across the universe like
an albatross soaring on the winds of space. He talked of a sea
novel,
a Kwakiutl rock opera, the Sixties revolution and the New Man he
supposed
would be its legacy. He talked of wax and strings and sailing
things.
The dark room in the end of the wooden shed became many places and many
times.
There is a Chinese object made of boxes within boxes
within
boxes. I don't know the specific philosophical purpose behind the
creation, but one rainy, cold winter day in 1982 I spent some time
there.

I know an author who has written sixty
books.
He lives in Portland, and you have probably never heard his name.
Having written a small, very good novel that went nowhere, I envy
Kesey's
luck, or skill, or both, at getting attention for himself, and so his
work.
In the beginning, P.T. Barnum-like, he painted a bus strange colors,
named it "Further," and went on a road trip to introduce himself to the
world. He grabbed hold of the emerging culture from which we all
suffer to this day, and made himself an icon in its pantheon.
That
marketing genius created the name familiarity that allowed his literary
genius to fulfill all of its possibilities.

Recently, I interviewed science fiction
legend,
Ray
Bradbury, then did a piece for this magazine. Kesey read the
piece, and sent the following email.

.
Larry--
Good old Bradbury. He was an early hero.
It came as quite a surprise that when he was
at the top of my heap he was barely known.
I like it that he's zoomed up with this late day
popularity.
--Kesey
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|_ FURTHER _|
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